Author: Victor

Structuritis

Inflammation is the root cause of many “-itis” diseases. Similarly, we have places where structural design elements become inflamed and painful.

In a meeting yesterday I used to the term “landing page-itis” to describe the situation where a website landing page makes sense in one category so landing pages are added in all categories. What follows is an exercise of figuring out what kind of information will go on the new landing pages. To let the structure drive what is created is backwards; in user-centered design it’s the audience’s need that should drive the structure and the information created. If the structure becomes inconsistent or lopsided, then the whole structure should be revisited to see if it’s working.

The same thing happens with headers (headeritis). We may start a list without headers:

  • Telephone
  • Flower
  • Pencil

Then add items that require a sub-group, with a header for the sub-group:

  • Telephone
  • Flower
  • Pencil

    • Colors

  • Red
  • Blue
  • Green

Which then compels us to make up headers for everything:

    Other Stuff

  • Telephone
  • Flower
  • Pencil

    • Colors

  • Red
  • Blue
  • Green

The extra headers aren’t really useful, but we put them in for consistency, rather than admitting the structure might not work and fixing it.

Make Tools: My IA Konferenz Keynote Slides

In my keynote talk at the 2007 IA Konferenz in Stuttgart, Germany this month, I argued we need to create fewer artifacts and more tools. We’re already doing this, but it’s easy to get stuck in a make-more-web/mobile-sites rut and that could lead to irrelevance.

Here’s the slides…

By coincidence, Joe Lamantia’s The DIY Future: What Happens When Everyone Is a Designer addressed a similar theme through a different lens soon after at the Italian IA Summit. Joe and I are friends and hang out in Brooklyn, but I can’t recall us talking about these presentations. Must be something in the air…

When Design Innovation Comes Down to Execution

Matt, formerly of Nokia, counters the notion that Apple alone has the best touch user interface ideas, but also that it’s not the idea that won that race, but execution…

In recent months we’ve seen Nokia and Sony Ericsson show demos of their touch UIs. To which the response on many tech blogs has been “It’s a copy of the iPhone”. In fact, even a Nokia executive responded that they had ‘copied with pride’.

That last remark made me spit with anger – and I almost posted something very intemperate as a result. The work that all the teams within Nokia had put into developing touch UI got discounted, just like that, with a half-thought-through response in a press conference. I wish that huge software engineering outfits like S60 could move fast enough to ‘copy with pride’.

Sheesh.

Fact-of-the-matter is if you have roughly the same component pipeline, and you’re designing an interface used on-the-go by (human) fingers, you’re going to end up with a lot of the same UI principles.

But Apple executed first, and beautifully, and they win. They own it, culturally.

Agile with a capital/lowercase A

It looks like agile software development is having the same growing pains, expressed through semantics, as the design field (or the Design field). It’s the perceived misapplication of language that catches my eye…

Jason Gorman argued that the meaning of Agile was ambiguous and was being inappropriately applied to a very wide range of approaches like Six Sigma and CMMi. He also argued that “Agile”, “evolutionary”, and “lean” (as in Lean software development) did not mean the same thing in practice, even though they are all lumped under the banner of “Agile” – possibly for marketing purposes. Gorman argued that process-oriented methods, especially methods that incrementally reduce waste and process variation like Six Sigma, have a tendency to limit an organisation’s adaptive capacity (their “slack”), making them less able to respond to discontinuous change – i.e., less agile. He also argues in later posts that “agile”, “lean” and “evolutionary” are strategies that need to be properly understood and appropriately applied to any specific context. That is, there is a time to be “agile”, a time to be “lean” and a time to be “evolutionary”.

Fascinating, but a nuance that will be completely lost on business clients who are focused on other matters. But just as IDEO shows what they do instead of only talking about it, I think making it all tangible will be a way around the semantic mess. I’d like to see the Agile Alliance produce a “shopping-cart“-like video of an agile project.

Interview on the State of Information Architecture

I’m on my way to the IA Konferenz in Stuttgart this week where I plan to talk about the future of the web design profession by learning from other technology-related professions and projecting out the current trends.

To preface that, Jan Jursa invited me to answer five questions on his blog, for example this one on collaboration…

Information Architects can’t simultaneously become experts in their field and in finance and accounting. The reverse is also true: people trained in business can’t also become experts in design. We need to collaborate. And to collaborate we have to know enough to understand each other, and build respect for each other. Therefore, we should become better at explaining what we do to business people — now I think we spend too much time just talking to ourselves.

Published
Categorized as Process

IDEO’s UMPC Vision Video

A nice example of what I call a tangible future. I like how it starts with more conventional examples and then ends with others that have believable gestures but without clear intentions, which could make it a good conversation starter between IDEO (the design firm) and Intel (the client).

Print Media I Like These Days

  • The Week is a compilation of world news in a thin weekly magazine format comprised of tiny articles. You can read the whole thing every week and stay current. The Week is smaller than newspapers and with more breadth than traditional weeklies.
  • Monocle might be the best example of a business design journal because it doesn’t try to be one, it just naturally combines business, culture, and design issues with a serious, authentic voice.
  • Play is the New York Times occasional magazine of sports. If, like me, you don’t have time to follow sports, or think you might like knowing more but need an intelligent introduction to the games and personalities, Play is a great read.
Published
Categorized as Writing

Scrybe invite?

I’d love to check out Scrybe to try the innovative interaction design for myself. If you have a beta invite can you share?

Back in NYC

I’m back in New York after two fantastic weeks on holiday in Europe. If you’ve written, I hope to get through all my emails this week.

One observation I made moving through Ireland, France, and Germany was how little the Internet really assists in everyday life. Although hotels appear to be more likely to provide email access (even small hotels had a free computer in public areas) — and this proved useful to a significant percentage of those I saw — otherwise the media and tools we use are still mostly non-computer based. This isn’t necessarily a difference between the U.S. and Europe, just something I was able to see with fresh eyes as I myself abondoned the computer and mobile for two weeks.

Published
Categorized as Travels

Online Design Pattern Languages, 2nd Generation

It’s great to see design pattern libraries like Yahoo!’s getting a lot of attention these days. I’ve been working on planning one for a client recently and thinking a lot about what makes them successful. In short, I think the newer, popular ones are immediately useful, meaning you can directly insert the pattern into your work during the design process. This hasn’t always been the case.

Roughly ten years ago, interaction designers started to see how patterns were used by programmers and began writing their own patterns, just as Christopher Alexander knew people could. I was part of this wave, for example with this short paper introducing the topic to my colleagues.

But many of the patterns at the time were a little too clever. And the books that came out (and that are still coming out) are a little too abstract to be useful. Instead of giving one concrete observation of a design artifact with an example we can immediately use, they go one level of abstraction higher, in the hope that more generalized descriptions will last longer and be more widely applicable. But this just requires too much work from the typical reader; people have enough constraints to deal with, they want the answers.

Pattern languages so far haven’t been good design tools. Christopher Alexander himself realized that pattern languages didn’t do a good job of helping to generate coherent designs or objects. The ones that seem to be most useful like Yahoo!’s and Welie’s (and templates and stencils and the recent wave of AJAX frameworks) are fairly concrete — you can look at a pattern and copy it (sometimes downloading examples and code). They offer patterns that help people execute a design rather than do design.

And while Alexander et al’s original book is thoughtful and philosophic, it also focuses on concrete examples.

Great Process Leads to Great Products

That simple idea (hopefully obvious to anyone who has tried it) that great commercial products aren’t simply the result of great product ideas is one I’ve mentioned before in the context of company culture and improving capabilities over time. But compared to the concrete sexiness of topics like the iPod and Swiffer this argument isn’t quite as riveting.

So I’m happy to see the mainstream press pick up the theme, such as this Pascal Zachary article in the New York Times, The Unsung Heroes Who Move Products Forward.

“Process innovation, even more than most product innovations, also tends to realize its economic potential through a lengthy process of incremental improvement based on learning by doing and other types of learning,” [David C. Mowery, a business professor at the University of California, Berkeley] added. “So ‘breakthroughs’ in process engineering are, if anything, even rarer than in product innovation.”

One thing this has taught me is to not lead with innovation as a theme, as it’s an ambiguous topic that can frame matters the wrong way, as being only about great ideas or high-risk/high-return product bets. I think communities like Agile developers, by focusing on process in a compelling way, are making great progress innovating at the process level.

Business Model Diagrams

Inspired by Samuel Mockbee’s work helping architecture students make actual homes during their studies, I’m having my Business & Design class at the Pratt Institute do business design work on an actual business. We’ve studied business operation and finance, secondary and primary research, and business idea sketching. Monday we’re kicking off our project with a visit from the client.

A tool I’d like to use to capture the essence of the client’s business in a snapshot is a business model diagram. I’ve found two good examples:

  1. Peter Rip’s
  2. Alex Osterwalder’s and below…

What Makes a Good Job? Trust

Milton Moskowitz, who has co-authored “The 100 Best Companies to Work for in America” since 1984, disovered (not surprisingly) that to really learn what makes a good job you need more than surveys and secondary research, you need to talk to employees. In this article, We Love Our Jobs. Just Ask Us, he identifies several benefits that go into a good job, but one key characteristic:

A good workplace is one where management trusts the employees and where employees trust the management.

Which is illustrated in comments like…

“I feel I get a fair share of the profits of this organization,”
“I am proud to tell others I work here,” and
“There is a minimum of politicking and backstabbing here.”

Videos from Overlap 2007

The magical Overlap 2007 event happened this past summer in the woods north of Toronto, a weekend devoted to exploring the intersection of business and design. To keep it conversational and intimate the size is limited to about 40, but for the first time thanks to this year’s organizers there’s video from the event on the site.

A highlight for me was the presence and conversation with Jeanne Liedtke, as I think her research, teaching, and writing has done the most to define and disseminate the core ideas of business design. She focuses on practical outcomes, yet is comfortable spinning beautiful metaphors and embracing big ideas, so I recommend you start with her video.